with the aid of a dictionary. Other soldiers
read their legends and laughed at them: "My heart is to you." "Good
luck." "To the success!" "Remind France."

The man who was buying the cards fumbled with French money, and looked
up sheepishly at me, as if shy of the sentiment upon which he was
spending it.

"The people at home will be glad of 'em," he said. "I s'pose one can't
forget Christmas altogether. Though it ain't the same thing out here."

Going in search of Christmas, I passed through a flooded countryside and
found only scenes of war behind the lines, with gunners driving their
batteries and limber down a road that had become a river-bed, fountains
of spray rising about their mules and wheels, military motor-cars
lurching in the mud beyond the pave, despatch-riders side-slipping in a
wild way through boggy tracks, supply--columns churning up deep ruts.

And then into the trenches at Neuve Chapelle. If Santa Claus had come
that way, remembering those grown-up boys of ours, the old man with
his white beard must have lifted his red gown high--waist-high--when he
waded up some of the communication trenches to the firing-lines, and
he would have staggered and slithered, now with one top-boot deep in
sludge, now with the other slipping off the trench boards into five feet
of water, as I had to do, grasping with futile hands at slimy sandbags
to save a headlong plunge into icy water.

And this old man of peace, who loved all boys and the laughter of
youth, would have had to duck very low and make sudden bolts across open
spaces, where parapets and earthworks had silted down, in order to avoid
those sniping bullets which came snapping across the dead ground from a
row of slashed trees and a few scarred ruins on the edge of the enemy's
lines.

But sentiment of that sort was out of place in trenches less than a
hundred yards away from men lying behind rifles and waiting to kill.

There was no spirit of Christmas in the tragic desolation of the scenery
of which I had brief glimpses when I stood here and there nakedly (I
felt) in those ugly places, when the officer who was with me said, "It's
best to get a move on here," and, "This road is swept by machine--gun
fire," and, "I don't like this corner; it's quite unhealthy."

But that absurd idea--of Santa Claus in the trenches--came into my
head several times, and I wondered whether the Germans would fire a
whizz-bang at him or give a burst of machine-gun fire if the